Taste of Utopia

In the winter of 1983, Maharishi decided there should be a course for 7,000 people on the MIU campus… in six weeks. Many people threw themselves into the project. Each of them, whether they were working behind the scenes or in the Kitchens, taking care of course participants in Registration or Housing, involved in the construction projects, or throwing their houses open to sleeping-bag-toting strangers, did their part to make Maharishi’s dream a reality. And each of them has a story to tell.

The Sweet Taste of Utopia Album

by Paul Fauerso, San Antonio Texas, US

This is a song that I wrote during the Sweet Taste of Utopia course. And there’s a little bit of a story I could tell about what happened with me during that course

There were so many soldiers, so many peace warriors just accomplishing miracles during that time. I mean, it was the coldest winter in 150 years or something like that. There were tremendous ice storms too and yet they built this shed, a building which was supposed to take maybe a year to build.

It took something like three or four weeks to build it.

No one can really explain how anything was achieved in that period of time.

Before the course, Josie and I were in Washington, D.C. in the fall of 83. We had a little meeting with Maharishi, and he was talking about the Sweet Taste of Utopia, Sweet Taste of Utopia. And then he said to me, “You should write a whole album on the Sweet Taste of Utopia.”

And I thought, “Okay, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then all of a sudden, Maharishi was announcing this course, it was going to happen. We were living here, and I had a studio above the Fairfield Ledger, so I started writing some songs.

I already had a couple songs and I started writing some more. My engineer friend from L.A. came out, Jeff Peters, and he and I were working on stuff. Periodically, I’d run over and sing at the shed, and then run back to the studio and try to write some more songs.

Right before Maharishi was going to go into silence, so it was New Year’s Eve, I got a phone call from Dr. Bevan Morris.

He said, “Paul, I have a message for you.”

I said, “Oh, what’s that?”

“Well,” Bevan said, “Right before Maharishi went into his room to go into silence, he said, ‘Make sure Paul Fauerso has 500 copies of his Sweet Taste of Utopia album for sale by the end of the course.’ Then he closed the door.”

It was the holiday season, you know, I hadn’t really recorded anything, I’d just been writing a few things. So I thought to myself, “Okay, well, that’s impossible… But, you know, I can take people’s orders, and then when I get the album done in two or three months I can start the process of filling the orders, and I guess that’ll be fine.”

The next morning, I was walking around the square and met a fellow named Dusty Moss that used to live here. He was a good friend, a citizen siddha, and I explained the whole thing to him.

“It’s a nice thought,” I said, “But there’s no way I can have it done by the end of the course, so I’ll just do my best.”

Dusty looked at me, and he said, “Oh, so the master gave you an assignment, and you’re not going to do it?”

And I said, “I’m going to do it. It’s just going to take a little while.”

“No, you have to face up to what you’re doing. You’re refusing to do what you’ve been asked to do and that’s not good.”

“When you put it that way,” I said, “yeah, it’s not good.”

“What do you need?”

“Everything. We have to get it all recorded and I haven’t even written enough songs for the album.”

He says, “Get busy.”

I said, “We need artwork.”

“Shepley Hanson”

I said, “Okay. We also need a printer,” you know, because it was cassettes then.

“My sister works at the local printing press. She’ll take care of that.”

I said, “We’ll need duplication.”

“Let me look into that.”

So we just kind of started churning it out. I would write songs, and we would record them. I didn’t even know if they were any good. It was just, “Okay, next, let’s keep going.”

By the end of the course, I had 500 cassettes of A Sweet Taste of Utopia – the Album for sale at the trade fair. And I still don’t know how it happened. No idea.

Finishing Maharishi’s Apartments

by Kingsley Brooks

One of the greatest memories of my experience with the Taste of Utopia was the preparation of Maharishi’s suite in building 151. We completely re-renovated the whole thing through the help of the Sacklin brothers and Tom Brooks, and I think the big thing that stood out for me was how it all came together at the very last minute.
It really seemed like it was absolutely impossible.

Bevan called me from Ottumwa and said “Maharishi’s on his way.”

We knew that he was going to be arriving in 20 minutes, and when I looked around the suite I just could not imagine how it could actually come together. We had a whole team in there, people putting in the rug, putting the siding on the walls and painting, even at this late stage in the game, and Bevan had told us to just focus on Maharishi’s room and the lecture hall, the little upstairs meeting hall.

We had just finished installing the elevator and the real memory that stood out to me was when Maharishi arrived. I got into the elevator with Nandkashore and Maharishi, just the three of us in this very small elevator and it had never been used before. I closed the elevator door and pushed the button and nothing happened. My heart sank. Luckily, I had the wherewithal to sort of rattle the little cage where the gate shuts, it engaged, and the elevator moved.

As we were going up, Maharishi looked at me and said “How are you doing?” and I said “We’ve been
working very hard, Maharishi.” He said “Yes, now you can rest.” Well we didn’t; we realized that probably we wouldn’t quite be resting yet but it was a very blissful moment. Maharishi went up in the elevator and got out and he met with Stuart Zimmerman and Bevan and then prepared to go and greet everybody at the Patanjali Dome.

As I came out escorting Maharishi to his room I saw people slipping out from behind the door of Maharishi’s room. They literally hid behind the door as they were finishing the very last things and tiptoed out but it was just like a miracle that everything came together.

Another example of this was when we were preparing everything and Henry Clark called me at six in the morning, and he had a company who said that they could completely redo the stage in the Dome. At that time it was a small stage and we really wanted to have something more grand, but it was again one of these things where it’s a risk to do this, and it had a time element we were concerned about. I went to Bevan. Bevan was just waking up–it was about six o’clock in the morning.

“Bevan, we’ve got a modular company who can bring the whole stage in,” I said, “we can fix it, you know, to expand the stage. Should we go ahead?”

He said “Yes, go ahead.”

About three hours later I reminded Bevan about this stage starting to be constructed, and he said “Why are you re-doing the stage? We shouldn’t have done that.” He didn’t even remember telling us that he had told us to go ahead on that. Again it was one of those things and I think all the people who were there would remember that just as Maharishi was walking into the Dome, people were nailing the carpet down and completing the final touches. It really was an example of something very miraculous.

The whole thing just came together by nature–things that you could not imagine would actually happen as we prepared for Maharishi with just six weeks’ notice: redoing the whole building 151, building up a garage for Maharshi on 151, building a garage for Maharishi at the Dome; so many things that you would never imagine.
Another example was Warren Berman telling me that the elevator would take ten weeks to buy and deliver and he did it in two weeks. So these were the kinds of things that were happening on and on and on. Jai Guru Dev
everyone!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

By Tim Pelton

During the buildup to the Taste of Utopia course I was part of a small Siddha-owned construction company here in Fairfield and we were asked to build the double-ended garage on Frat 151 that would accommodate Maharishi’s limo. So we dug trenches in the frozen ground, built forms, and poured concrete footings in fifteen degrees below zero weather. We would work all day and when it got too dark we’d go inside and work with John Stimson and the finish carpentry crew putting up crown molding until well after midnight.

One of the guys on the inside crew had talked to a road-grader driver who was working on the new Utopia Park mobile home project and he told this story. It seems the fellow who was grading the streets that would soon be lined with mobile homes had not been happy when he climbed into the cab of his machine the night before.

To help house the thousands of Siddhas expected for the course, it had been decided to turn the patch of undeveloped prairie on the north edge of the campus into a 200-unit mobile home park. To do a project this size, especially when the factory hasn’t started building the homes yet, usually takes a minimum of 6 to 8 months. They had 3 weeks.

The road-grader driver was tired. He had been working for hours and had hours more to go. It was 15 degrees below zero and the heater in his cab was not keeping up. It was 2 a.m. and he was trying to grade the frozen ground by the light of his headlamps. That was when the thought occurred to him that he could just turn off the grader, get in his truck, and drive back to Iowa City. He knew that if he did that, the whole project would grind to a halt and they would lose several days just finding a replacement. But as the night wore on, the temptation to leave grew stronger.

Then he realized that someone was standing in the road ahead of him. As he got closer he saw two women, bundled up against the cold, each holding some kind of container and signaling him to stop.

“So I throttled down the grader, took it out of gear, and climbed down out of the cab,” the driver told my friend.

“What are you ladies doin’ out here at 2 in the morning?”

“We just wanted to thank you for the work you’re doing,” said the women, “and we made you some chocolate chip cookies and hot chocolate.”

“These weren’t store-bought cookies, these were homemade,” said the driver, “still warm from the oven.”

Munching on cookies and sipping hot chocolate, the man climbed back into the cab. All thoughts of leaving had disappeared. He went back to work.

Do you have a favorite story that would fit in this category? The TM Memories Project would very much like to include it here. To go to our Submissions Page, please click here. Follow the instructions there to share your story.